Life by the Lake

It’s hard to think of a more idyllic place to grow up than Shai Kalach’s birthplace of Kibbutz Ginosar, on the shores of the Kinneret. Blue skies and azure waves contrast with the green lawns and red roofs of the houses. Look one way and Teveria clings to one bank. The Golan Heights rise steeply from the other.

The Gemara mentions repeatedly the extraordinary fertility of the valley, whose fruits are a taste of the World to Come (Brachos 57). “The Ginosar Valley is over here,” says Kalach, pointing out the contours of the hills running down to the lake. “The valley is bounded by two streams — Arbel and Tzalmon. Over there is Mount Arbel, next to it Mount Nitai — named after Nitai Ha’Arbeli, the tanna mentioned in Pirkei Avos.”

Born in 1982, Shai didn’t look to the skies — he was boat-mad. “I spent my childhood here on the Kinneret,” he says. “I would skip school to go fishing on the kibbutz boat, won a national sailing contest when I was 14, and my brother nearly qualified in sailing for the Sydney Olympics.”

Bobbing on the sunlit waves as we speak on the kibbutz’s pier, are the next generation of Ginosarian sailors. It’s easy to see how the lifestyle — with community, wide-open spaces and the blue yonder — lends itself to rearing a self-confident, rounded personality.

Despite its prime location, Ginosar is anything but luxurious. The modest homes and neat but spartan communal facilities of the kibbutz make it obvious that the place hews close to its socialist past.

“From a young age, I was raised in the children’s home, which is like a kindergarten with sleeping quarters,” says Kalach. “Life here meant demanding outdoor work in the orchards, combined with a lot of the camaraderie of a close-knit community. And the kibbutz ethos meant helping others, taking responsibility. Failure to step up was unthinkable.”

Those positives remain the bedrock of Shai Kalach’s own attitude to life and hard work. Yet there were other, less desirable aspects of the kibbutz lifestyle.

“The worst Jewish education system in the world is here in Israel,” says Kalach. “The secular Zionist movement tried to create a new Jew — erasing Jewish identity. For example, my history teacher was supposed to teach about the Second Temple period. When I asked what does the Beit Hamikdash mean, she couldn’t answer.”

So for years what little Jewish symbolism existed was digested through the lens of Labor Zionism. Pesach meant a ceremony based on the Haggadah of the Kibbutzim, with gems such as this:

“Kadesh — This night is sanctified in memory of those sparks of light who toiled  day and night — pioneers of the valley and the Golan, the Kinneret and the Jezreel — who sought to build a national home rooted in social justice, mutual responsibility, and a sense of mission.”

Shavuos meant a kibbutz-wide Bikkurim celebration in the communal dining hall, complete with first fruits of the orchards, and zero religious content.

Hovering over the kibbutz was the legacy of its most famous son, Yigal Allon. This soldier-farmer archetype was a commander of the Palmach — the army of the pre-state Yishuv — and later, IDF general and senior politician.

A far-left socialist, Allon — whose portrait (strikingly similar to that of Yitzchak Rabin) guards the entrance of the Yigal Allon Museum in the kibbutz — was a founder of Kibbutz Ginosar, where he lived until his death in 1980. Although Shai Kalach was born a year later, he grew up very conscious of Allon’s legacy.

“As a boy, I used to go and talk to his wife Ruth, who passed away in 2020. For me, Israel’s generation of founding pioneers was very real. I grew up conscious of their Zionism as settlement, aliyah, and defense.”

But there was another cultural strain at home — one that would eventually pave the way for Shai Kalach’s shift to religion and the right.

“My mother comes from a Moroccan home, and my father — who passed away suddenly from cardiac arrest when I was 21 years old — was descended from a religious family.

“His father was from Tzfas — from a rabbinic family which had been in Eretz Yisrael for hundreds of years. Like many of his generation, my grandfather left religious life when he was a teen to join the Irgun underground fighting the British. But he would slip Jabotinsky essays into my pocket, made Kiddush every Shabbos, and brought me to shul on Yom Kippur.”

In such a secular place, all three were heresy. So, too, was voting for Menachem Begin. Yet in 1977 — when Begin turfed out the Labor party in a landslide — two of the four locals who secretly voted for the Likud leader were Amit and Yardena Kalach.

Th kibbutz elders were apoplectic that any of their neighbors had dared to vote for the enemy, but given the secret ballot all they could do was fume.
“If we catch those who voted for Jabotinsky, we’ll throw them out of the kibbutz,” declared one.

Given those mixed signals, it’s unsurprising that Shai Kalach was pulled in different directions as a teen. “During the Oslo process, I demonstrated alongside Arabs against the Jews, and was happy when things got violent,” he recalls.

“I was thrown out of two high schools as well. In retrospect, I was dissatisfied, searching — I just didn’t know what for.”

Reach for the Skies

The impulses that eventually led to the beis medrash took Shai first to the cockpit. As a teen, he dreamed of joining the army’s elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal. But in 11th grade, the flying bug bit. Literally and figuratively, he was aiming for the top of the world.

It’s hard to overstate the cachet of being a fighter pilot in Israeli society. In the oft-quoted words of Palmach poet Haim Gouri, mourning those killed in the War of Independence, they are the “yefei hablorit ve’hatoar” — the fallen youth, handsome and noble.

“Despite my patchy school record,” recalls Shai Kalach, “I was accepted into the Air Force’s most elite track: the pilot’s course. I had strong grades in physics and math, and perhaps my kibbutz background helped. After four grueling years of training and conversion onto the F-16, I became a fighter pilot.”

One of Kalach’s first missions was after 9/11, when an interception alert came through for passenger planes that might crash into sensitive targets.

Another memorable flight was one Pesach night, when an alert came through that a plane had entered Israeli air space from Egypt. Kalach’s F-16 was scrambled, and he made contact with the errant plane, firing flares to nudge it back on course.

As the adrenaline of the intercept dropped, the young pilot suddenly realized the significance of the timing. “It was Seder night, and there I was flying over Egypt. Sixty-five years before, we were burned in Auschwitz — and today I’m at the controls. It was a formative night. I understood there’s something larger than me, which I need to understand.”

Kalach’s flying career lasted almost a decade, including the Second Lebanon War, where he was the last pilot to drop bombs before the ceasefire came into effect.

His time in one of the world’s most advanced fighting units, he says, gave him a wealth of meaningful tools. Kalach ticks them off. “The culture of debriefing and constant improvement, leadership, ambition, initiative, goal-setting. Excellence, professionalism, organizational culture — these are incredibly important life skills that the air force gave me.”

As soon as the war with neighboring Hezbollah was over, the well-oiled machine that is the Israeli Air Force switched focus to an enemy hundreds of miles to the east.

“We trained extensively to attack Iran,” Kalach recalls. “We practiced long-distance flights of five to six hours including aerial refueling. You need to stay focused the whole time because you’re flying over enemy territory, like Syria and Iraq.

Man and Meaning

But along the highs and thrills of active duty, something was niggling under the surface.

“As a fighter pilot you feel on top of the world,” he says. “But the gap between that aura and understanding what I was defending bothered me. I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know why I was getting up in the morning, I didn’t know what the return of the Jewish people to their land after 2,000 years of exile was really for. So, without any dramatic trigger, the question of meaning gradually merged with a deeper search for my Jewish identity.”

There was something else, too. As the Air Force downsized, Kalach was handed training roles, eventually commanding the officers’ course in the flight school.

There he confronted the changing face of the IDF: Forty percent of new IDF officers were religious. As a graduate of the Yigal Allon school of kibbutz Zionism, this was a shock. “I felt Zionism had been stolen from me,” he says. “Suddenly it was the kippah-wearers who were becoming the backbone of the army.”

Faced by their waning influence in the military, many other secularists have doubled down — railing at the supposedly-messianic newcomers, intent on religious coercion under the direction of their fundamentalists. But Shai Kalach didn’t choose that path — he wanted to understand more.

While serving on active duty, Shai married Galit, the girl almost next door — a native of Kibbutz Alumot, ten miles further around the Kinneret. The wedding took place on the shores of the beautiful lake, and the couple settled in Teveria, in Shai’s grandfather’s apartment, which was lined with 2,000 books. That library was destined to be part of his personal journey.

“The first time I kept Shabbos — I couldn’t stop crying. The soul cried,” he remembers. But as he undertook that teshuvah process, Shai was essentially alone — at least professionally in the ultra-secular air force.

“There was a squadron commander who had become religious — he was about ten years older than me — and I was able to ask him a few things. But the pilots around me saw it as something completely foreign. As far as they were concerned, I’d lost my mind and was part of what they saw as an attempt to take over the army.”

When his regular service ended, Kalach — now aged 27 — took a gap year to find himself. For him, there was no right-of-passage trek through the Andes or to Goa, but an immersion in that vast library.

After a year spent cataloguing his grandfather’s books, and hiking the Israel Trail, the pilot’s search for meaning took off.

“I headed for yeshivah, first in Eli and then on to Har Hamor in Jerusalem. In the beis medrash, amid Chumash, Gemara, and halachah, I found the answers — a world of meaning 4,000 years old.”

At first, Galit Kalach didn’t join her husband on his new path. “My wife is an angel,” says Shai Kalach. “She immediately adopted a kosher kitchen for me but it took a while for her to start keeping Shabbos. But when she saw its light — what it meant in practice — she came aboard.”

The main disagreements early on centered around what kind of education the couple — then parents to one little girl — would give their children in the future. But those disagreements faded — as did initial resistance from the wider Kalach clan.

“At first, it was a shock for my mother and brother,” recalls Shai. “But once they saw the blessing that came with returning to a life of Torah — honoring of parents, more meaningful relationships — they were moved by it. Family and children — these things shine their own light into the world.”

Acceptance didn’t come so easily in Ginosar, where his dark suit and kippah make him an unusual sight. Those locals we meet as we walk around greet Kalach with a mixture of fondness and bemusement as befits the prodigal son who has taken an odd turn in life.

Democratic Deficit

In an indirect way, it was Shai Kalach’s erstwhile neighbors and colleagues who thrust him into public life, after 12 years in the beis medrash. When the judicial reform protests broke out in early 2023, they were powered by exactly the sort of people whom Kalach had grown up among, and worked alongside.

Centered on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street, they were a weekly howl of outrage against the right wing-religious bloc’s attempt to assert its majority will on a court system that seemed beholden to progressivism.

Lavishly underwritten by the country’s financial and media elites, the protests took the Netanyahu government by surprise. But what drew Kalach into the fray was when his fellow pilots got involved.

In July 2023, a letter was published in which hundreds of air force personnel — including pilots and navigators — said that they wouldn’t serve reserve duty if the proposed justice reforms went ahead.

For Kalach, that was one step too far, and in an interview back then, he said so — with more than a hint of foresight.

“Anyone with a shred of sense can see these are red lines,” he said, pointing out the national security implications of the most vital arm of the military going on strike. “If we cross them, our enemies will seize the chance to hit us.”

Six months later, that prediction came true in horrifying fashion. In real time, Shai Kalach stuck his head above the parapet by organizing a counter-letter which itself became a cause celebre. In the name of other pilots and more junior air force personnel — many of whom are of conservative orientation — the letter condemned those pilots who said that their service was contingent on the political winds blowing in their favor.

“Senior Likud minister Yariv Levin told me that the counter-letter stopped the wave of refusal in its tracks,” says Kalach. “Once it became clear that they didn’t speak in the name of the Air Force, the effort collapsed.”

But Kalach realized that the pilots’ letter was just a symptom of an attitude that was profoundly undemocratic — a deep-seated sense of entitlement. That attitude stemmed from the very pioneering drive that had underwritten so much of the secular Zionist achievements in Israel.

But it was a double-edged sword, because along with a sense of duty came that of ownership.

“This isn’t just about the Air Force,” he explains. “It’s about what’s called the “deep state.” People imagine some shadowy octopus — the High Court, the media, the police, the Shin Bet. But the real deep state is an organic system — a consciousness of entitlement that has existed for 120 years, since the Second Aliyah.”

That, he says, explains his own dismissal from the Air Force in the early days of the war. Almost two years after that display of institutional bias, Kalach still finds it hard to believe what he experienced. “An upside-down world — the one who fought against refusal was treated as an outcast.”

But the way that it happened was intuitive. “It’s not that the High Court orders an officer to remove me. It’s that the culture itself produces that outcome automatically.”

If much of this sounds like standard right-wing talking points, that’s because Shai Kalach is a paid-up member of the Israel’s New Right, which takes some of its frames of reference from American conservatism.

But Shai Kalach isn’t just another conservative talking head, spouting about elites, postmodernism and the Deep State. He’s harder to ignore — the golden flyboy who crossed the lines from the bastions of the left to the rising right.

Problematic Pundits

Within a short time of the war’s outbreak, it was clear to Shai Kalach that former military leaders were causing a new problem. They were no longer calling for soldiers to refuse callup orders. Instead, they showed up nightly on the country’s news programs, casting doubt on the aggressive military strategy championed by Bibi Netanyahu.

Some were against going into Gaza at all. Others against angering the Egyptians by conquering Rafiach in the southern Gaza Strip. “Rafiach is just a distraction — Sinwar isn’t even there,” said one of the place where the Hamas killer was eventually hunted down.

Shai Kalach went into action. Under the banner of Netzach Yisrael, his new grassroots organization to fight the whiff of defeatism emerging from the retired officer’s industrial complex, he paid for giant advertising hoardings against the general in question.

“Time to stop listening to the men of the conceptziya,” the banner read, using a term for the discredited pre-October 7 strategists.

Notable was the hoarding’s location. Positioned near the Kaplan intersection in Tel Aviv which is the anti-government movement’s stomping ground, it was a giant declaration of intent not to cede the field to the left.

Over the last year, Kalach’s grassroots organization has expanded into a movement of over 20,000 members, with around 4,000 paying monthly membership dues. That funds media work and a program of meetings and advocacy work.

It’s the small beginning of the resources needed to take on the left’s juggernaut, he says. “We’re up against organizations massively funded from abroad — we on the right need to step up our game to match it.”

Turning Point

Whenever Shai Kalach is interviewed, one thing immediately becomes obvious: For all his fluency and conservative viewpoints, more than a dash of his early elite status remains.

That’s not just in the fluent, authoritative way that he holds his own in debate, but also in the un-populist way that he validates the very concept of the elites. The torch is in the process of passing from the left to the right where a new leadership has emerged, he contends.

“An elite is a two-edged thing,” he says. “On the one hand it’s a leading force that builds a nation. On the other, power corrupts. When the elite uses its tools to maintain hegemony — the public grows sick of it. Today the public is discovering a new, uncondescending elite that’s Jewish in its identity and proud of its tradition.”

When the time is right, Shai Kalach intends to take part in that leadership effort, and views national politics as a natural next step in his journey. “Ahead of us is a political realignment, not at the next election — which I hope that Netanyahu wins — but one beyond that. After this war, the old politics will disappear and something new based on a stronger Jewish identity will grow.”

If all of that sounds like a vague attempt at prophecy, Shai Kalach says that the seeds of change are evident all around — including back home in Ginosar where the staunchly secular kibbutz now has a minyan on Yom Kippur.

“The mainstream left is gradually waking up, and in my view, we’ll see this reflected in the results of the upcoming elections,” he says. “The radical left, on the other hand — much like in the United States — is becoming increasingly extreme and is slowly disconnecting itself from the broader Israeli public.”

For the iconoclast from the kibbutz, the student of Yigal Allon, then Vladimir Jabotinsky and now of the beis medrash, that swing in sentiment is a seismic event.

The pilot who sees 1967 parallels in the strike on Iran, detects similar historic echos in the shifting ideological landscape.

“Israeli society as a whole is undergoing transformation,” says Shai Kalach. “Awakening, reconnecting to its historical roots, and returning to tradition. Nothing like this has happened since the Six-Day War.”

Tehran Time

Twenty years after he first stepped into the cockpit, when the news of Israel’s stunning strike on Iran broke this year, Shai Kalach had a unique window into what had happened. His old F-16 A aircraft had been retired, many of the weapon systems were light years ahead — but the bare bones were familiar.

“This was a success whose closest comparison is the opening attack on the Egyptian and Syrian air forces in 1967,” he says. “We’re talking about hundreds of aircraft arriving with pinpoint timing at different points in a country twice as large as Texas.

“Just before the planes entered the danger area of surface-to-air missiles, in complete coordination between the units, commandos hit the surface-to-air missiles. Then the Air Force could bomb the nuclear reactors and the surface-to-surface missiles.”

The success of the coordinated attack, he says, was miraculous. The Air Force itself estimated that ten planes would be lost — in the event, none were. “You only get one roll of the dice. If the Iranians would have been alerted with the planes route — if the opening strike had failed — then years worth of planning would have been lost and Iran’s leadership and capabilities would have survived.”

Although Kalach remains tight-lipped about many of the details of the audacious attack — details he’s aware of through the grapevine and his own experience of the attack plans — the Air Force itself is less circumspect.

In a speech that made news as our interview takes place, Air Force commander Tomer Bar stated that some of the jets that attacked Iran didn’t need to refuel enroute. This was a clear nod to the rumours that Iran’s regional foes such as Azerbaijan offered Israel forward bases to stage an attack.

“Of course I would have wanted to take part,” says Kalach. “To take part in such an attack to defend Israel is a dream mission.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1081)